Google Goggles Identify What’s in Your Pictures

Google Goggles being tested

Image from Flickr.

Have you ever taken a server’s wine recommendation at a restaurant, and then wanted to know more about it after tasting it? Google Goggles could be the answer to this quandary. If your smartphone runs on the Google Android operating system, you could snap a photo of the bottle, and Google will conduct a search.

The Google Goggles page at Google Labs has several other suggestions for how to use Google Goggles, such as getting more information on landmarks, album covers, books, works of art and restaurants. You can even snap a photo of someone’s business card instead of typing their name into Google. For now, Google Goggles is only available on Android, but if a lot of people use it, it likely will become more widely available.

Google Goggles scenario

Google Goggles technology uses text recognition, so if you wanted to know whether a payday lender had a good reputation, you could snap a photo of the sign on the building and get information about the company. This could come in handy, as a lot of payday lenders have similar names and it’s easy to get them confused.

However, Google Goggles can recognize the specific company logo and likely get you more accurate information. This same concept will help when your friend thinks a local restaurant is part of a chain or you want to know where a product was made.

Check out Google Goggles video

The makers of Google Goggles made a short video that explains how you can use Google Goggles to recognize and call phone numbers. The video also talked about the current limitations of Google Goggles and how they plan to develop the technology further in the future.

You can watch the two-minute video on Google Goggles at the Google Labs site. Here’s a partial list of phones that run on Adroid and thus can take advantage of Google Goggles: